The present invention relates generally to building websites, and more particularly to systems, processes, and applications for creation of websites from both traditional computing devices and mobile devices.
The Internet has for a couple of decades been used to relay information, advertise, and engage in e-commerce. More recently, businesses are increasingly turning to social media networks to publish their messages, advertise, and attract and retain customers. With the increase in web site building and publication tools, many users who might not otherwise have the time or skill to create their own websites or the money to hire an outside consultant are now publishing to the World Wide Web. For example, such tools often provide web page templates that allow a user to enter personalized content and select web page layout, styles, fonts, colors, etc., and then immediately publish the completed pages to the Internet.
More recently, the addition of data connectivity capability to cellular phones, resulting in what is known as the “smartphone”, has transformed not only the phone industry but also the rate of communication between such users and their accompanying expectations of such devices. Smartphone users now connect directly to the Internet and demand the same capabilities they would have had were they browsing the Internet using a traditional computer.
Furthermore, with the rising popularity of social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the methods and channels for advertising and connecting to customers have become prolific.
At the present number of websites accessible over the Internet (estimates as of early 2010 are in the hundreds of millions of websites), and as the number of web sites and web pages increases, the importance to a business of having an Internet presence, including a website, a mobile-ready website, and pages on all the big social media networks, cannot be underestimated.
In order to assist a user to quickly establish an “online” presence, several websites offer, often in conjunction with a domain name registration service, website building tools that provide a user interface for guiding the user through a series of questions and tools to select and configure the layout, content, and order of web pages on the user's website. Such website building tools, for example as provided by Vistaprint.com and by Webs.com, provide a number of tools, accessible via an intuitive user interface, that allow a user to select a theme, a layout, images, text, and a font and color scheme. Such tools may also include graphical controls that upon activation by the user, allow the user to add functionality to the web page. For example, such graphical controls often enable such functionality as adding a map to the web page, adding a form, etc.
Many Internet users access the Internet using their phone or mobile device more frequently than using a traditional device such as a desktop or laptop computer. Some users even access the Internet exclusively using a mobile device. However, the traditional website building applications have not kept pace with this trend. Traditional website building applications are designed for creating web pages optimized for display on the larger screen of the desktop and/or laptop displays. The content of traditional web pages often dictates frequent interaction with the server hosting the website building application and/or hosted website. Often, such website building applications allow the user to create highly customized stylized web pages with images and other content which pass from the server to the requesting device as large data files (500 KB up to several Mbytes). For example, a single image to be rendered on a web page may involve the transfer of one or more Megabytes of data. While such images and fine detail make for a more aesthetic and sophisticated looking website, such content is not ideal for display on mobile devices which have smaller displays and slower data transfer rates. Additionally, website building applications typically utilize the full traditional display screen for displaying the web page under construction and panels of editing controls and widgets that can be dragged and dropped onto the web page. Traditional website building applications are therefore impractical, and depending on the device sometimes impossible, for use on a mobile device. A user operating a mobile device but desiring to create a website must typically wait until they have access to a desktop/laptop device with a traditional screen and high-bandwidth connection to the Internet to select and provision a website.
Finally, to complicate matters, the number of different types of mobile devices with differing operating systems, hardware configuration and capability, and communicating over different types of communication channels with different levels of transmission bandwidth (which on mobile devices is typically much lower than the bandwidth of “wired” lines), adds to the challenges faced by online website management service providers in providing a simple, fast, and intuitive online website creation and editing application.
Accordingly, what is needed is a simple, fast, and intuitive online website creation and editing application and service for allowing Internet users to create and publish a website from any and all of a traditional computing device, mobile device, or tablet device. A website should preferably be created, customized by the user, and published within a short period of time (e.g., 10-15 minutes). A user should further be able to perform all of the creation, customization, editing, and publishing on a mobile device, and the resulting website should look good across all different types of mobile devices.